Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

MrSeb writes "As part of IBM's Battery 500 project — an initiative started in 2009 to produce a battery capable of powering a car for 500 miles — Big Blue has successfully demonstrated a light-weight, ultra-high-density, lithium-air battery. In it, oxygen is reacted with lithium to create lithium peroxide and electrical energy. When the battery is recharged, the process is reversed and oxygen is released — in the words of IBM, this is an 'air-breathing' battery. While conventional batteries are completely self-contained, the oxygen used in a lithium-air battery comes from the atmosphere, so the battery itself can be much lighter. The main thing, though, is that lithium-air energy density is a lot higher than conventional lithium-ion batteries: the max energy density of lithium-air batteries is theorized to be around 12 kWh/kg, some 15 times greater than li-ion — and more importantly, comparable to gasoline."

This idea is going to seem ridiculously silly in the future when batteries can charge faster than a tank can fill (Even Gen. X'ers will live to see it, I'm sure). I will seem incredible forward-thinking B-)

You'll most likely still need to drive to a "fuel station", regardless. Filling such a high capacity battery inside of five minutes requires an incredibly high current.
While certainly not impossible, the strain on energy distribution and the amount of wiring (the wire has to be thick to withstand the current!) will make it cheaper to have a few dedicated charging station rather than every house on its own.

Rather than fill a battery up in five minutes, I'd prefer to just plug it in when I drive it back into my garage at the end of the day. That covers almost every situation (except for those crazy road trips - but even then, it's unlikely we're driving non-stop for days on end.)

Must be nice to own a home. Many urbanites either live in an apartment or condo. Often with designated shared parking. The very core group of people that could benefit from EVs are at a disadvantage when it comes to recharging them. I suppose you could have a recharging pole next to each parking space like an old school drive in movie theater from the 1950s with wired speaker mounts. But then you looking at maintenance, vandalism, and the dense electrical infrastructure capable of handling the nightly recharging load.

As others have suggested, the best way to address this with EVs is to use swappable cells where the owner pays for electricity and not the container (battery pack). The cells of course being a public vessel by which to obtain a recharge.

"Filling such a high capacity battery inside of five minutes requires an incredibly high current."

Nope, you can get 480/277/240 lines installed at low current and charge just fine, assuming your battery bank is within that voltage range (assuming there is nothing else than a rectifier to go from AC to DC.).

What's going to be the killer is how FAST you can safely charge the battery.

Fuel stations will not be able to compete with, smart shops, malls, restaurants, parking stations charge you car while parked and add it to the bill, every minute counts and it's not a large price, spend enough and have the charge thrown in for free (induction charging). Even kerb side parking can incorporate induction charging. You can of course charge up when you visit family/friends if your running low (wouldn't abuse that too often).

I see your porint, but it might be a little overblown. The leaf has a battery of 24 kwh, and you likely won't find any EVs over 50kwh in the near / mid future. so the 4x is a little high. second, for longer-range driving, no big deal, different strokes for different folks. If your driving needs ar compatible with an EV, then you can get an EV. If an EV can't meet your needs, then you can get a gasoline car. Your comment is common, and it implies that this is a death knell for EVs, like they're impractical a

If your driving needs ar compatible with an EV, then you can get an EV. If an EV can't meet your needs, then you can get a gasoline car.

Exactly.

Your comment is common, and it implies that this is a death knell for EVs, like they're impractical and will fail. Not true, just different strokes for different folks.

I see a lot of EV proponents discounting the drawbacks, and arguing every which way that EVs with just a little bit of improvement will be good enough for nearly everybody. Let's face it, hipsters congregate in dense urban areas where any car is a luxury, and many just can't imagine that some of us actually live a long way away from anything;-)

Funny thing is, I would need a lot more range to use an EV, but slow charging times would not bother me so much for a secondary car, because many times it would have multiple days to charge;-)

Let's face it, hipsters congregate in dense urban areas where any car is a luxury, and many just can't imagine that some of us actually live a long way away from anything;-)

Have you considered that living far away from everything is a luxury too? We're going to have to give up some of our luxuries if we want to be sustainable. Rural living for those not involved in agriculture is probably one of them.

I see a lot of EV proponents discounting the drawbacks, and arguing every which way that EVs with just a little bit of improvement will be good enough for nearly everybody. Let's face it, hipsters congregate in dense urban areas where any car is a luxury, and many just can't imagine that some of us actually live a long way away from anything;-)

Except that statistically that argument is true. MOST people in the US don't drive that much further than 40 miles per day. Some people do live a long way from everything (I used to drive 100+ miles per day, every day, for five years). Most do not. Most people's daily commutes would be served by EVs. The TCO issues and the long tail use cases are the issue, not the daily use scenario.

My bullshit meter is being pegged off the charts to even consider this. Yes, there might be some supposed "automated facilities' that could pull this off, but I shudder to think of the potential accidents, lawsuits, and other issues that could come from such a "fast recharger". "Training" might be able to help with the technicians who are at a filling station performing this task, but any kind of casual attitude will result in a great many deaths.

I'll also note that the example of a Nissan Leaf is hardly the best one to use as well, as it certainly isn't going to have this magical "500 mile range" as suggested in the original article.

As for grid impact.... I've seen first hand what the current infrastructure of California has for any kind of significant grid impact. I was involved with a.... interesting industrial scale engineering project (subject to NDAs for specifics that I can't go into right now). Let's just say almost everybody in the SF area would recognize it if I mentioned it.

The interesting thing about it for the purposes of this discussion is that it used 1 MW of energy off of the existing power grid in downtown San Francisco, and I was on the engineering team to get it set up. As a part of our testing process, we would "turn it on" and often use that full rated capacity of sucking the 1 MW off of the grid for relatively short periods of time and then turn it off after the test (usually about 15-20 minute test for what we were doing). At the same time we had the radio on tuned to a local station, and it made us sick to realize that when the device was turn on that it triggered blackouts throughout the city and those blackouts ended when we turned the device off.

Even if you use a power buffer like a huge capacitor bank to store the amount of energy needed to recharge a vehicle like a Tesla Roadster (which has roughly the quoted 500 mile range suggested in the original article) in a short period of time, that capacitor bank will need to be recharged in roughly a similar amount of time... with a power load for a heavily used recharging station to be roughly equivalent to this device I was using in San Francisco. I could easily see such a filling station be in the MegaWatt range for power consumption. In other words the overall electrical transmission infrastructure to get a whole series of stations like this built would require a substantial construction effort just to get those power transmission lines put to all of those station.

So do you like a future with high voltage power lines being built in your backyard? That is the future you are asking for here, where those become a much more common sight in almost everybody's neighborhood. The grid impact of these stations is going to be enormous with any kind of electric vehicle future.

Just think of the potential accidents that could happen with ordinary drivers operating dispensers of incredibly flammable gasoline on their own! We need automated facilities, or at least trained technicians, if we are to dispense this hazardous fuel to our cars. And imagine a future with high-capacity gasoline tanks buried underground in the middle of a city, slowly leaching fuel into the surrounding soil in almost everybody's neighborhood!

Direct current flows through the entire cross section, so area counts. Alternating current induces forces which push the current towards the outside. The dimensions where this skin effect is strong enough to consider depend on frequency. For 60Hz, you can ignore skin effect for currents less than about 100A.

This idea is going to seem ridiculously silly in the future when batteries can charge faster than a tank can fill (Even Gen. X'ers will live to see it, I'm sure). I will seem incredible forward-thinking B-)

For a website filled with electrical and computer engineers, the entire notion that you can recharge an electric battery quick with enough energy to be able to send an automobile over 500 miles in less than 15 minutes should seem totally ludicrous.

What are you expecting to have happen, somebody figure out how to discover news laws of physics akin to discovering how to travel faster than light?

The sheer amount of energy to perform this kind of action is going to require connectors to the recharging equipment

where do you get this 200Wh/mile? Wind resistance and storage conversion (in and out) inefficiecincy are the dominant factors for highway travel. wind resistance is pretty much set by the size of the car's crossectional area. So irrespective of how light or efficient you can make the engine you are not going to beat that. I estimate it take 30KW to push a honda accord size car at highway speed.

This idea is going to seem ridiculously silly in the future when batteries can charge faster than a tank can fill (Even Gen. X'ers will live to see it, I'm sure). I will seem incredible forward-thinking B-)

For a website filled with electrical and computer engineers, the entire notion that you can recharge an electric battery quick with enough energy to be able to send an automobile over 500 miles in less than 15 minutes should seem totally ludicrous.

No, it should seem feasible, but difficult. I don't expect computer engineers to necessarily have a clue, but as an electrical engineer, I've previously run the numbers, and will proceed to redo them quickly for your benefit:Going off my general knowledge of gasoline-powered automobiles, a "typical" car might get 35 mpg cruising at 55 mph using only 50 hp (not engine rating, actual horsepower used at cruise), and has a fuel capacity of 20 gallons.Using these figures in the obvious way, I come up with about 1.7 GJ of mechanical energy at the crankshaft. Permitting 90% electrical->mechanical efficiency, that'd be 2GJ of battery required for equivalent performance. (Quibble with my typical values if you like, but I think I'm correct to order of magnitude.)

The sheer amount of energy to perform this kind of action is going to require connectors to the recharging equipment to be in the kiloVolt range, or perhaps MegaVolt and have amperage with that voltage that can only be supplied by a direct power line to a nuclear power plant.

Charging a 2 GJ battery in 15 minutes requires on the order of 2 MW, plus charging inefficiencies. While this is certainly infeasible for a standard home installation, it hardly requires a nuclear power station; Wikipedia says the world's largest coal-fired power plant is 4GW. 2MW is feasible for recharging at highway stations, provided that electric cars are mostly recharged overnight at home (at much lower rates, manageable by household wiring), reducing demand from every vehicle, all the time (as with filling stations) to only those vehicles needing a top-up during the day (mostly road trips). Then you can get away with a single 2MW service at each station, ~20 MW to match the 8-12 gas pumps needed to service the gasoline fleet during rush hour.

(This is not to say our electrical infrastructure won't need significant upgrades -- distributing it to homes and over a longer time doesn't change the total energy required; but that's a separate issue.)

Worst case, suppose electric infrastructure can't be extended to supply some filling stations for whatever reason -- maybe they're off in the boonies somewhere. What would it take for my neighborhood gas station to set up the ability to recharge electric cars from its liquid fuel supply? Well, as it happens, producing 2.6MW from diesel fuel is a solved problem [wikipedia.org] with significantly improved fuel efficiency from vehicle engines, which combined with the elimination of road tax on fuel consumed by the generator, makes it economically feasible. (Yes, this takes away much of the supposed "green" benefit of electric cars, but if the car runs on overnight charging from nuclear power 90% of the time, with the occasional diesel-fueled quick charge for road trips, I'd call that a win; it's certainly better than running a gasoline car all the time because there was no quick-charging option.)

There is one issue with these 500mi batteries I can think of, how do you charge them quickly? if you assume it takes about 30KW do push a prius sized vehicle at 50mi/hr then a 500 mile battery would mean about 300Kw/hr storage. I'm not sure if that is what is here or not, but let's assume yes. To charge a 300kW/hr battery in ten mites would require a 1.8MegaWatts connection for every car at the "pump". Sounds kinda dicey. do you really trust that every car pulling up is maintained so well that a bad co

Considering we pump highly flammable gasoline into the same thing I would say yes.

The charge controller on the car would function like the one on your laptop. Of course there would be a data link and some sort of cable test before full power was turned on, or do you think these will be charged by stripping the end off a lamp cord?

Cruising at highway speeds takes between 15-20HP for most passenger vehicles, 15kw in something the size of a car is nothing. You routinely see a single rack of servers using that kind of power, a passenger car is about the size of 5 racks so you should be able to charge at 5x your discharge rate without anything more than a bit of forced air (AC will be needed if ambient is above ~90F assuming the battery can handle temperatures similar to what electronics can handle). Now, that still means it will take ~1

A nice idea, but what if you didn't want to do a complete charge up for whatever reason? It would be a significant headache for swapping stations to have to carry batteries of many different levels of charge.

Back when I was poor I had to limit my travel to currently available cash. I wasn't always able to afford a full gas tank and would only fill up $3-5 worth until the next payday. Sometimes overly privileged people that don't have to live on a budget don't know these things.

I have found that the not "overly privileged" don't know how to live on a budget. They just tell themselves that they do. I have been poor. Your comment is right in there with the people who say that they can't pay off their credit cards because they are poor, so they keep the cards maxed out, pay off a little each month, and then recharge the amount they paid off.

If you put $5 of gas into your empty tank, you will be able to drive $5 worth of distance. If you put $5 of gas into your mostly full tank

Not tenable. Do you really want to trade the brand new battery in your brand new car for a used one with an unknown number of duty cycles? If so, I'd be happy to trade the fully charged battery in my MacBook for your brand new but empty one. Sure mine says "replace battery now" in the health indicator but it is fully charged and compatible with other laptops with the same battery form factor.

Ah, but that's the beauty of it: You don't need to know the number of duty cycles.
You exchange your empty battery for a charged battery with the assurance of the fuel station that this battery carries the charge you just paid for.
And if that one's empty, you'll replace it again.
Furthermore, you can insert some electronics to store and display statistics - no need to sell a dumb battery.

Liability of the swap station. Large propane cylinders are leased and are not cheap to buy. Return one undamaged and get a certified good one. If it dies outside of an accident the swapping company replaces it.

You will only care about that issue if you *own* the battery that comes with the car.

If battery swap stations were the norm, you undoubtedly would never own any battery. Instead, batteries would be like discs from Netflix.

In an ideal world, they would only be able to bill you for the actual amount of juice that you ended up pulling out of the battery before you have to swap it again (as determined by your car's and/or the battery's control logic).

Drat you've got me. God forbid you have to take a half-hour break to get an 80% recharge after driving for over 8 hours at highway speed. You might even have to choke down a snack to bury your sorrows.

>>>God forbid you have to take a half-hour break to get an 80% recharge

Batteries don't charge from 10% to 80% in just 30 minutes. And for good reason: They got very hot and the internal components become damaged, dramatically shortening the battery's life. (And then you have a $5000 replacement... equivalent cost to buying a whole new engine.)

Gas stations mostly operate on thin margins on the gasoline itself, with the profit center being trying to get people to walk in the door to by some snacks/drink/whatever. Generally only items that can be browsed and purchase comfortably in a minute or so, since the store doesn't want a car consuming a spot more than that.

However, having vehicles that require a lot longer to charge and can be safely recharged without the operator in attendance changes the dynamics. No longer do you have businesses that are places to replenish vehicle range primarily, but you have a wider variety of businesses where they want people to sit around for a lot longer time away from their car. Some may provide metered charging as a way to augment their revenue or recover cost of the service, some even may provide it for 'free' to draw people in the door. You can already see this happening. In my area, there are shopping malls with currently free charging access. There are also restauraunts with metered chargers. A number of employers are starting to mention free charging as a perk, in part to draw people in and in part to show off how 'green' they are.

Not an absolute requirement by any means. Current cars can do an 80% recharge in half an hour, more than adequate for most people. Remember that in the future the idea will be to charge your car in the car park or at home, not just on the road. If you manage to hit the 500 mile range then half an hour to recharge your own body is probably a good idea.

Remember that in the future the idea will be to charge your car in the car park or at home, not just on the road.

Actually, in the future, it is likely that you will be able to recharge while you are driving. Here is how it will works: automatic lane control and braking systems will enable cars to travel in "platoons", with just a few inches between cars. This will greatly extend the range of your car by reducing air resistance, but the cars can also be magnetically coupled, so they can push and pull each other. So if you are on a long trip, and your battery is low, the computer in your car can automatically negotiate with other cars in the platoon and purchase power. You can use this to coast without draining your battery, or even run your engine in reverse and recharge your batteries as you drive.

I've been with the "range anxiety" crowd for a while now... the current capacity of electric vehicles has meant you pretty much MUST own a second car, or you'll be renting a "real" car pretty often.

If my car can go 500 miles on a charge? The last time I was riding in a car that went that long without an overnight stop (which could be used for charging) was college. Now that I have actual money? If I'm going 500 miles, I fly. (And even if I was driving, I'd get a hotel room for overnight... straight-thro

Flywheel storage. Under existing service station forecourts, are massive fuel tanks. Replace them with flywheel energy storage systems (which can be trickle-charged from the grid and discharged very fast if need be), and we may yet be in business.

Flywheel storage are used to augment the National Grid in powering the Joint European Torus, and can deliver many tens of megawatts of power on demand.

Great... now if they can build an infrastructure of recharging stations or at least be able to promise to build one, all over the country where you can juice up your car to 90% full or better inside of 5 minutes, we'll have a winner.

tfs says that the energy density is like gasoline and 10x lithium ion. but it's talking gravimetric density, i.e. kwh per kg. The only thing that matters is volumetric density, i.e. kwh / liter. This is because cars are space constrained, not weight constrained. So nothing to get excited about for vehicle range, because we have not data on it. For all we know, it could be worse. likely it's about the same as li-ion, because most of the battery volume is taken up by packaging and cooling, not the active mate

Nail, hit hit. Weight is an important factor, but what is important is how much space the battery takes up with all its cooling and safety systems. If it still is competitive (or heck, within an order of magnitude) with gasoline, we have something revolutionary.

Otherwise, it will go on the shelf with supercaps and many other battery technologies that had promise, but couldn't deliver.

However, the reason why we still use gas/diesel engines is that gasoline takes up a relatively small amount of volume for the energy it gives off, even at 25% efficiency or less. Getting batteries that are are in the ball park with energy storage with volume would completely change this. Electric motors do not need an intake/exhaust system, and the cooling system can be downsized due to less waste heat.

Cars are both space and weight constrained. If the car weighs a lot more (and hybrids and electrics certainly do) it takes more power to accelerate it. It also takes more power to keep it moving on the highway due to increased rolling resistance. More power required implies more battery (or sacrificing power density for energy density), larger power electronics, heavier motor, etc. Cutting the weight of the battery pack by a factor of 2, let alone 10, would be tremendous.

500 miles on one charge would solve the vast majority of issues. It's slightly beyond the maximum distance I travel at once (I visit family out of state regularly, about a 420 mile drive, which is generally about as far as a single driver is likely to go in a single "sitting" without a substantial break).

If they can A) get cost reasonable and B) get a decent amount of infrastructure for 3-4 hour charging of the pack, it's a pretty valid contender for viable replacement of the ICE for the average driver.

With this battery, sure why not. The only thing preventing it now is energy density, you couldn't carry anything of meaningful capacity. At this energy density you could carry extra packs that wire up to terminals in the trunk.

Include an unfoldable solar panel in the car and a small pole to put a mini wind turbine on;)

Or,
for those rare occasions when you're going to be driving 500 miles in a day,
rent a small fifth-wheel add-on trailer with a fuel tank and generator set.
The amount of power needed to maintain highway speeds is rather small,
on the order of 10-15 horsepower.
Several gallons of alcohol or a modest tank of compressed biogas
can be refueled quickly during long trips.
For the large majority of driving, though,
you

Still can't take me from Maryland to California in 3 days, because of the time-to-recharge issue. Your EV would need to include a gasoline generator to recharge the battery as you're driving, and then it's a hybrid.

Now:

What about the danger of explosion? As it recharges it release oxygen. You wouldn't want to leave your Lithium-oxygen EV in your garage but outside so the O2 can safely escape rather than build up.

What about the danger of explosion? As it recharges it release oxygen. You wouldn't want to leave your Lithium-oxygen EV in your garage but outside so the O2 can safely escape rather than build up.

The danger of high concentrations of Oxygen is not a concern about explosions, but rather fire. Oxygen in high enough concentrations can burn almost anything, which is where concerns about compressed Oxygen is treated as a hazardous material subject to special transport considerations.

Still, the partial pressure of Oxygen would need to be substantially higher than the already existing percentage of Oxygen in the air we are currently breathing, and for home recharging operations done in a typical garage...

OK, I'll bite. This is an "air breathing" battery that uses oxygen from the atmosphere to create lithium peroxide and electrical energy. What if I drive to some place where there is no air, like Los Angeles, and get stuck there?

Goes boom? It'll catch fire but I don't know of any battery that can go up in a movie-style explosion. And just like a gas tank, if you manage to damage your battery you've just been in one helluva accident and the track crew should be by with extinguishers shortly.

The summary makes it sound like they've never used air in batteries before. Most small batteries, including hearing aid batteries, are zinc-air. This is why they come with a small sticker on one side - you remove the sticker and give the battery a minute or so to take in air. That said, I don't believe the zinc-air batteries "breathe" like how the article describes, and they're certainly not rechargeable so kudos to IBM.

Assuming this can be productized in a relatively reasonable timeframe, this is a HUGE advance. And, if IBM is reporting it, it is more likely to actually be true. (As opposed to some random no-name startup with results that cannot be duplicated and just happens to be up for a round of funding soon...)

Odds are it doesn't release enough oxygen to make a huge difference with most common flammables. Even if it does, it can be solved with a cheap and easy weekend project to add an exhaust vent to your garage... something you may want to invest in anyway. Likewise, the mass gained by discharging it is probably a small fraction of the overall battery weight and won't make any noticeable difference - go pick up an air compressor that's empty. Now fill it up to max rated and pick it up. There's a weight gain, bu

The thermal energy in gasoline has to be converted to a more useful form of energy (i.e. turning the wheels), the efficiency of this is going to be ~20% for a automobile. The battery is supplying much more useful energy, the efficiency of converting electricity to useful energy is going to be something like 90% (or more). So a battery with the same energy density of gasoline actually has at least 4 times the useful energy of the same size (weight actually) gas tank.

Putting aside a potential flaw in reporting, you are still ignoring efficiency.
Gasoline engines are only 15-20% efficient. Even at 20%, that is 47.2*0.2 = 9.44
Electric engines are around 80% efficient. 9*0.8 = 7.2
Suddenly it is a lot more comparable...

1. It's the same order of magnitude. Yes, that's comparable.2. The AC above you actually gives you the exact reason it's better than that. A gasoline internal combustion engine will be 20%-35% efficient at translating that 47.2 MJ to rotary motion of the wheels. A lithium air powered electric motor, however, is 80%-90% efficient. So you're looking at 9.4-16.5 MJ at the transmission versus 7.2-8.1 MJ at the wheels. Assuming a 95% efficiency drivetrain from flywheel to wheels that gas power goes down to 8.9-15.7 MJ. Yeah, that's pretty comparable. Of course, gasoline engines are over 100 years old and lithium-air battery systems less than a decade old, so I think there's some room for improvement there.

According to the video we won't see these batteries in cars until "2020 or 2030". That seems like a long way off considering the summary says "demonstrated a light-weight, ultra-high-density, lithium-air battery" As far as I can glean from the vague articles is that all IBM has done is demonstrate the fundamental chemistry on a supercomputer. As far as I can tell they have not actually built a working battery of significant size and definitely not one of a size that would power a vehicle. There have been may technologies that work well in pristine laboratory environments but fail when they attempt to scale and/or have to deal with the dirty environment. Sure the battery may even work on a small scale when exposed to pure oxygen but how does it deal with the other elements in the atmosphere? Take a look at this [wikipedia.org]. I do not see where IBM shows how that deal with any of these issues.

From the linked video it states that a car sized batter will probably not be available until 2020 or 2030. I think the subtext to that is really "We don' think this technology is actually viable and hope that some new technology will be found within the next 8 to 18 years that will make our research moot but give us money now anyway".

Based on your link and the summary, it looks like the theoretical energy density maximum of Li-air is about six times the theoretical energy density of Al-air. Most of the other issues mentioned in your link have already been solved and it looks like they're still being actively developed for use in portable electronics (IE: laptops).

This is from IBM, so it is intended for a laptop computer, right? The cathode may be ambient oxygen, but with the energy density involved, if I park this thing in the wrong place, I could burn by anode?

the investors in Big Oil make money, not oil When other energy sources become available, they will invest in those. they know we're coming off of peak oil production and they want their money flow. they just want their big piece of the action.

Not big on chemistry, are you? Oxygen is not flammable. It is the opposite of flammable. Flammability is the property of being combinable with oxygen in such a way as to produce flame. O2 does not combine with O2.